TIFF Bell Lightbox

All of us should occasionally stop and consider how lucky we are to have the TIFF Bell Lightbox. On top of the populist arthouse fare that populates the majority of their schedule, the Lightbox occasionally introduces a brand-new audience to underrated, underappreciated, or simply underseen filmmakers. The latest addition to this tradition is the Goethe Institute-curated mini-retrospective, Ulrike Ottinger in Asia; a program of four features, three of which are Ottinger’s celebrations of various Asian cultures (the…

Contemporary cinephilia places – at times – undue emphasis on the auteur in relation to their work and in relation to the works of others. Intertwined authorship and intertextuality are the two most recurrent approaches in film criticism. As such, it’s easy to rationalize the existence of the Hitchcock/Truffaut: Magnificent Obsessions retrospective at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, given the sheer amount of discourse written on the famous relationship of Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut.

By: Addison Wylie It’s neat to watch a subject take on an evolution people didn’t see coming. In Red Obsession’s case, that subject is wine – and it’s progression isn’t pleasing everybody. Documentary filmmakers David Roach and Warwick Ross capture a timeline that shows how wine went from something that was considered an art, to a product that is more of a business decision than anything. The price of wine keeps on climbing to a…

By: Addison Wylie The image of the feeble pirogue (the film’s featured boat) floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is a perfect metaphor to describe my abandoned interest towards Moussa Touré’s drama La Pirogue. I wanted to like Touré’s film. A title card leading to the end credits dedicating the film to those who have made the trek – and may have died – from Africa to Europe to seek a better life…